Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave Read Free Book Online Page B

school. There’s a couple of car magazines sitting on the bench and somebody has left out a bag of sandwiches. Andrews makes it back. He hands us a key with a tag on it that says Dwight Smith, #10.
    “Did he say or do anything out of character yesterday?” I ask. “Or did anybody come to see him?”
    “Yesterday was my day off,” Andrews says, “but I can find out for you.”
    “Okay, you do that,” I say.
    Andrews seems like he wants to stay to see what we find in the locker, but manages to last only a few seconds of me and Kent staring at him until he wanders off. We open the locker. There’s a jacket hanging in there, it’s brown and made from leather and looks beaten up and old—could be he bought it secondhand, could be it belongs to his brother, could be it’s his from before he went to jail. Was last night warm? Not real warm. I wouldn’t have gone out without a jacket. There’s a cell phone that looks out of date. It’s still on, the battery sitting at fifteen percent. There’s no passcode required to switch it on. I check his call logs, his text messages, his address book. There’s work, his brother, his parents, the Preacher from the halfway house.
    Smith’s wallet is here. There’s a driver’s license and two twenty-dollar notes and a photograph of a naked woman that, when I pull it out, shows it was torn from a magazine. There are no bank cards. There are no receipts. There’s nothing else in the locker. I go through the jacket pockets. Empty.
    “It’s like he just decided to up and leave,” Kent says. “Except for his keys.”
    “His keys he kept on him,” I tell her. “This spare locker key looks identical to the one hanging out of the ignition of his car. He needed them to gain access to this stuff.”
    “Then why didn’t he use it last night to gain access?” Kent asks. “Where would he go without needing his jacket, his wallet, or his phone?”
    “You don’t need any of that stuff if you’re catching the front end of a train,” I tell her, which is one of two logical explanations. The other one being he saw something that made him leave in a hurry. We put everything into evidence bags. We close up the locker and put the lock back into place.
    My cell phone rings. It’s Hutton. “How are you getting on there?” he asks.
    I tell him about the cell phone, the jacket, and the wallet.
    “So either something spooked him,” Hutton says, “or the urge to kill himself came on so strongly he had to leave.”
    “There’s a third possibility,” I tell him because, after all, we’re all on the same page here. “He might have seen somebody who fit whatever fantasy he was conjuring up next.”
    “The service station will have surveillance. See if they’ll let you take a look at it, and if not we can get a warrant if things lead in that direction. The medical examiner just got here a few minutes ago. We’re getting the body bagged up and she’s hoping she’ll have something for us by the end of the day. The car is getting towed by forensics right now as well, and we’ll know more on that within an hour or two.”
    We hang up. Andrew Andrews is waiting for us just outside the locker room.
    “Get what you need?” he asks.
    “Almost,” I tell him.
    “Can I give the locker to somebody else?”
    “Not yet,” Kent tells him. “Not until we close the investigation.”
    “So what else do you want from me?”
    “Surveillance footage from last night,” I tell him. “And we still want to talk to somebody who worked yesterday with Smith.”
    “Not a problem on the second part,” he says. “You can use my office.”
    “And the first part?”
    He thinks about that for a few seconds. I can see the decision process taking place. Technically we need a warrant, and I can see him thinking that, and I hope he’s also thinking that the world is full of technicalities that, if taken away, would make it an easier place to live. So he nods and tells us the video surveillance